[/QUOTE]Installing Linux on a USB key isn't a trivial task, but you can find plenty of helpful hints on the Web. For best results, download Damn Small Linux ( www.damnsmalllinux.org ), and proceed in one of two ways: Burn it to a CD, boot it from the CD, and use the right-click Tools menu to install it to a USB drive; or—working entirely within Windows—follow the instructions found at http://fuzzymunchkin.dyndns.org:8080/tdot/usbkeyfob/index.php . Using both methods, we created USB drives that booted on most, but not all, of our test systems.[QUOTE]

Quote from: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1849716,00.asp

There are a couple other mentions of DSL in the article, not a short article, but interesing.